If you’re an Android user, Google is ubiquitous throughout the operating system. You can access Google Now on Tap from pretty much anywhere by long-pressing the home button, jump into Google Now directly from the launcher, or say “OK Google” to use your voice from pretty much anywhere in the OS. But each time you do one of those things, it creates a new search entry in your Google History.
If you’re searching things you don’t want other people to see—Christmas gifts, for example—then this can be a problem, as the next time you open the search box, the last three items you’ve searched for will show up.
If you want to make sure your search history is your search history, there are a couple of ways to go about cleaning it up. The first method allows you to clear things up one at a time, which is nice if you only want to delete a couple of things. The second will allow you to clean up data on a much wider scale. Let’s go!
How to Clear Individual Search Items
Clearing individual items from your search history couldn’t be easier. First, open up Google Now by whichever means you normally would: slide in from the home screen if you’re using the Google Now launcher, long-press the home button to open Now on Tap, or any other method that’ll get you to Google Now.
From there, tap the search box—a short list of recently-searched items will pop up.
From that list, just long-press the one you’d like to delete. A warning will show up asking if you’d like to permanently remove the search query from your history. Tap “Delete” to make it official.
And that’s that! You can do this for as many search terms as you’d like—older recent searches will show up as you delete the newer ones (in chronological order, of course).
How to Clear Search Results in Bulk
If you’ve decided that you’ve searched too many things that are for your eyes only and wish to never be reminded of such things (or have someone else stumble across them), you can also delete your search history in bulk.
Open a browser window and navigate to myactivity.google.com, which will take you to your Google Activity Center. You can also get there by jumping into Google Now > Settings > Accounts & privacy > My Activity. Either way, you’ll likely have to input your password before you can access this page.
From here, tap the three-line menu in the upper left corner, then select “Delete activity by.”
This will open a menu that will allow you to delete all sorts of stuff from your Google account, like ad tracking, Assistant commands, image searches, and a lot more. For the sake of this tutorial, however, we’re just going to focus on search history.
First, tap on the drop-down box that reads “All products,” and scroll down till you see “Search.”
Once you’ve selected the proper entry, you can choose a date range to delete: today, yesterday, last 7 days, last 30 days, and all time. Pick your poison, then tap the “Delete” button.
At that point, a warning will show up letting you know that your search history can be important. If you’re still not convinced, tap the “OK” button. You can’t undo what you’re about to do!
And with that, your search history for the selected time frame is gone without a trace. Poof!
It’s worth keeping in mind that this isn’t just for the search history on that particular device: this covers all of your Google account. It doesn’t matter if you’ve searched on your desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone—these options cover the gamut.
